Trusting Relationships between Individuals and Organizations

Trust between individuals and organizations is important for the success of global network organizations that depend on their ability to stretch relationships and interactions online and across wide spans of time-space. In order to explore this, the section draws on two examples of digital era interactions; one with an intra-organizational orientation and another with an external orientation.

Nandhakumar and Baskerville (2001) study digital interactions in a large multinational firm. The firm implemented Internet-based communication technologies to encourage collaboration both within and among the business units, and between their contractors and partners in joint ventures. The virtual teamwork technologies (a highpower desktop personal computer, desktop video teleconferencing and scanning, multimedia e-mail, shared whiteboard, and groupware/file transfer applications) were integrated, delivered, and supported as part of the firm's IT infrastructure.

Nandhakumar and Baskerville (2001) show that many temporary online groups formed to solve specific problems in organizations often exhibit behavior that presupposes trust. Many of these groups depend on an elaborate body of collective knowledge and diverse skills for solving problems, even though they had no history of working together. With a finite lifespan of the team, the individuals had little time to share experiences or demonstrate warmth and openness. The authors identify trust in this electronic relationship as 'abstract trust', that is impersonal and based on practices and processes of the organization. Lipnack and Stampts (1997) also illustrate a similar form of trust relationship in many of their anecdotes of 'effective' virtual teamworking.

Nandhakumar and Baskerville find three types of abstract trust that enable electronic relationships. First, individuals tacitly trust the technical and professional expertise that organizations possess and those they have reliably drawn upon in previous situations, although the specialists are not known personally in a digital context. Second, individuals rely on hierarchical order and policies for safe and legitimate daily interactions. The hierarchical systems and power relations embedded in the organizational context help legitimately to extend established authority relationships onto online interactions. Finally, individuals trust the established organizational routines and everyday practices as a protective mechanism in their ongoing organizational life. Routines provide a feeling of predictability and security, and help to extend organizational practices online.

Individual employees' trust in their organizations (abstract trust) is not given but actively developed through continuity of the day-to-day interactions of organizational members. As routines and practices that individuals trust are embedded in abstract systems, trust in these systems (and subsequently in the organization) is accepted as an existing condition. While reflexively drawing on these abstract systems in their organizational practices, individuals may indirectly help to maintain or transform the trust in the abstract systems. Jarvenpaa, Knoll, and Leidner (1998) also note such recursive relationships between individuals' activities and organizational trust. They therefore claim that "trusting action is as much an antecedent of trust as an outcome of it."

Similarly, Panteli (2002), in a study of a virtual team project, managed by a virtual organization and involving a group of geographically dispersed contractual employees, finds that the initial trust between the organization and individual contractors is contract-based. The contractual agreement signed between the organization and individual employees contributes to the scripting of trust; the contract, which in this case was output-, time- and regulation-specific, enabled the project to commence. Yet, this scripted trust was insufficient; it was low and fragile, and both parties (organization and individual contractors) needed trust to develop further. As an individual contractor put it, "I was doing work for people I never met, even though I signed the contract, and yes, [naturally] there were some doubts about payment." Moreover, the quotation below shows that as far as the organization was concerned, trust could only develop when the individuals who got involved proved that they had the competence to work on the project:

"If a person is part of [our] network, that implies that certain standards are met and thus the person is suitable to work for us. The only way to guarantee this is—apart from taking the CV and do[ing] an interview with the person, and … mak[ing] sure that they are electronically comfortable—we would … never ask a person to work directly with a client [if] they haven't either [completed] a piece of work [directly] for us or … worked with one of our project managers" (CEO).

At an early stage of this virtual team project, it became clear that the task was more difficult than anticipated, as the client asked that the final output be delivered earlier than the agreed date, imposing more pressures on all participants. Within this work climate, three factors are identified as critical in the development of trust relationships: competence, responsiveness, and openness. The content, both formal and informal, of communication, as well as its frequency, helps in building and maintaining an interactive social situation and can act as the frame of reference for constructing the trust relationship. This kind of relationship complemented the formal contract and takes the form of a social contract (Orr, 1996).

These studies demonstrate individuals' potential role in contributing to trust. In order to sustain trust in an organization, employees need to take the practice of good organizational citizenship seriously in terms of performing duties, which they owe to their colleagues (Turnipseed, 2000). Individual-to-organization trust, though existing at an initial stage of the relationship, needs to develop further as its abstract and/or scripted nature may not make it resilient enough to cope with the work pressures. For this purpose, particular attention needs to be given to the development of interpersonal trust, i.e., individuals trusting individuals.